A year of devastation, destruction and death. Farewell of great spirits, demolition of hopes. A „doom vibe“ in the air that doesn’t prevent musicians to create dark and shining beauty. Sometimes even escapism is a pathfinder.

P.S.: „Killing your sweetest babies“: that’s what film directors say, when they have to let go of great scenes for the greater good of the movie. So it’s hard not to at least mention all those great albums that could easily grow with time and end up, for example, in the last edition of this year’s „Klanghorizonte“. But I do resist the temptation. Hard.

Sometimes you open a door of your glittering advent calendar, and you are stunned – equally entranced and disappointed. Cause, as in this case, there’s no picture, just four words in big black letters (where are the winter birds at least?), like a promise made for an unknown future. This time I know the future. On February 3rd, Greg will find the solution and be a happy man.

I’m a bit quick, sorry, but I just did a two hours phoner with „American Wrestlers“. Yes, there are surprises here. I know. But it’s me, no clone. Your point of view keeps changing, when certain records with names known and unknown surpass your expectations by far. And a lot of it happened in the last weeks. Everybody knows: you hear a band you never knew it has even existed, and then, BANNGGG … like „American Wrestlers“. Me oh my! Did anyone expect the Monkees return with a game-changer of sorts: „Dead Men Don’t Wear Plaid“. Don’t be too sure. I will wear my Sting shirts again – he’s the giant – the living message in the bottle. At the end of the day, these records had the deepest impact on me reaching out for the deepest bottom of my soul. Some changes in the last moment, intuition over habit. Hey, Lord, what a glorious collection of masterpieces! Thank you for listening.

It all started when I built myself a metal shakuhachi. But you have to wait a bit, dear reader, for the return of this instrument. At the end of the month, this review will be a long short story, not a short short story. Or, if I’m running out of steam, it will be a short short story. A story? Well, because I like writing stories more than writing reviews. Give me some time to think twice. What am I doing just now? Stretching the now – ordering a Jack London novel, dreaming about Fairbanks, listening to „Reflection“. How is the light? Grey day. Don’t like the colour. Just rolling down the jalousies. And Eno’s music? Nonchalance. Catchy in a non-catchy way. Deep listening for minutes, then drifting of. Returning. There’s, from time to time, a whistling motif, a kind of whistling, but, probably, it’s no real or treated whistling. Great farmer’s work. Different territory though, leftfield. Like an early-morning-Emil-Nolde-coast-vibe. I’m daydreaming. Any plans for today? Not that I know of. Not in a thrilling „Friday On My Mind“-mood. Was that a Turtles song? Ah, no, Easybeats, easy does it. Nevermind. So, no colours exploding? Can happen. Not on the record though. I will look for my exotic birds, darken the room, light an African candle (they are called „swaazi“), put „The Jungle Book“ on the screen – bongos in the bush of ghosts. The Nolde-coast only works as mood, not as landscape. I remember, an orange grove (?) in Morocco inspired one of Eno’s other thinking pieces, „Neroli“. The place, the smell, the heat, it all might have added up to or informed some free floating tones, an unheared vibration – unfolding within another long stretch of the now. The old impact of asynchronism and generative processes: you always hear something different, though the components stay the same, or, nearly the same. You might treat the returnings, or let them untouched. I wouldn’t bet on how it works on „Reflections“, won’t ask Brian for his notebook. I’m recurring to these lines from time to time, no discipline required. More a kind of relaxed magnetism. Sometimes the composition is flooding my living space, sometimes I’m writing at other places, with the music in mind. That’s a difference, cause your memory is never shooting pictures of a track without some mild distortion or nostalgic timbre. Memory is a remix. In the windmills of your mind, certain motives swirl around, prevail, endure, vanish. (Before, in the end, Ian will have a last look at this, I’m not even sure some words I’m writing down are real English words, cause the music stimulates imagination.) Oh, and this is a review for the McGuiness book, cause never before a reader could watch the growing of a review from start (at least the first days) to end. Probably I will cancel this last sentence. So, what will be on the agenda? Mood, for sure. The term „old school ambient music“ (will give that term a „kick-in-the-ass-treatment“). A metal shakuhachi. The street scenery before Eno’s old London studio. Etc.

„All you folks and fools / Cary Grant’s Wedding / All you folks and fools / Have been invited to / A new-wave personality / Stumbles out of the ruins / ‚cause he’s been invited to Cary Grant’s wedding / Buster Keaton he turned up / He wasn’t a woman / He didn’t take hallucigens“

(The Fall)

I’ve always respected the howling of Mark E. Smith, but never had a knack for it. I only had one Fall record in my collection, „Live In Preston“, and it was a birthday gift from my old buddy David Webster who grew up in that fuckin‘ town, north of nowhere, as he put it into words. Weeks ago I had an appontment with another old chap, our master of dark Glasgewian humour, Ian McCartney, in Manchester. He met some old aquaintances, I saw Sebastian Schweinsteiger in a cafe. Well, nothin‘ I would give a dime for. But then, it’s always fun to meet Ian.

We went for some some fantastic Indian food and then to see John Carpenter live. It was a bit nostalgic, the old synthesizer vibes that made us shiver when we were lost in his Halloween and Fog movies. But this time it sounded like pastiche. Kind of. When I was 23 I was ready to fall into love with Jamie Lee Curtis.

Nevertheless John Carpenter once was married to the beautiful DJ at the lighttower of his horror movie „The Fog“, and she really became the role model of Mireia Moreorless, main figure of our review and story about Brian Eno’s „The Ship“. I had another name for her in mind , but Ian’s creation was a stunner. So, to be honest, in that movie I was ready be infatuated with two women at the same time.

For Ian the show had been pretty un-memorable, too, but for the fact he met Mark E. Smith, the punk legend, John Peel’s hero. I shook hands but stayed a bit behind. Have to say, he was quite funny.

Ian said something like, sorry but can I get selfie?

He said, sure, just let me get drink first.

Ian said „I’ll buy you a fucking drink as long as I can get a selfie“.

He then proceeds to order two cans of beer for himself and a gin & tonic for his wife! Bastard cost me £12, as Ian told me later.

It’s Ian’s decision to publish the selfie here, or not. For me, the encounter was not such a great delight, cause I never got into the Fall’s records. Though I always loved the title „Cary Grant’s Birthday“. I liked their attitude more than their music. Maybe if I would be a native speaker, it might have been different from the start. Home again I had a deeper look into some of his lyrics.

Mark E Smith’s lyrics are incredibly cryptic, Ian wrote me a week later when I offered my state of not really getting to the point, different to John Peel’s obsessiveness. Ian: „Nobody knows for sure what he is actually on about, regardless of whether they are native speakers or not. He seems to see the world through a mid-19th Century filter. A lot of the music is very atmospheric, up to about 1986, after that I tuned out.“

Atmospheric? Well, I must have missed something. But don’t we all?

In a second mail Ian quoted a part of a 1983 song: „The man whose head expanded was corrupted by Mr Sociological Memory Man, could not get a carrier bag for love nor money“. Andre Breton, Salvador Dali, Mark E Smith – all quite similar really, Ian added. Not to forget the mid-19th Century filter!

For Love Can Turn Us Still (FLOTUS) – the wonderful new album of Lambchop is on par with their classics – the subtle electronic innovations intensify their palette instead of reaching for a bigger audience. The album of December. The album for the subversive christmas tree. The album for friends of Frank O’Hara poems. The album for people who love albums they can listen to forever. In one way, and this is no joke, it even supasses SGT. PEPPER. Not one weak track! Or will anybody tell me that „Good Morning Good Morning“ is not rather crappy?!

Going back in time: some of you may have a decent memory about the second Jethro Tull album, the one with the stand-up cover. STAND UP now got THE ELEVATED EDITION, with lots of footage, films and, excellence as usual, Steven Wilson‘ stereo and surround remixes. Even Ian Anderson’s Bach-Bourée can still create a shiver in this new ambience. And the elevated edition is a book, too, full of stunning episodes. 1968, 1969 revisited. Brian Whistler’s tales of the SACD of Weather Report’s TALE SPINNIN‘ would be perfect, too, here (I got it, I heard it, I love it – a rediscovery!), but the comments there have an extra-value, so we leave it in the blog diary for its own good.

And a small change in our third column of monthly appraisals: the term „philosophica“ can from now turn into „psychologica“, „artistica“, „graphica“ etc., dependant on the object of desire. Anybody who has something in mind? Mail your proposal of a review to manafonistas@gmx! The first idea is often the best and will be taken! That is, by the way, the address of the real Manafonista headquarter, 500 miles away from my living place. Otherwise (a quiet bravo for my understatement, please!) my enthusiastic review of the wonderful #42 of MONO.KULTUR incl. the adventurous, spellbinding talk with thrill-seeking SOPHIE CALLE, mastress of Houdini-esque ego-dissolution, will find its place there. (A day later: oh, wonderful, from the backyard of the MHQ, someone went enthusiastic about a book that has a very special, vague, nearly ungraspable topic: MOOD.)

The MANA THRILL PRIZE FACTORY 2016 is offering a fine collection of new thrillers and crime novels beyond mainstream, and Stephen Dobyn’s eccentric, funny, dark, hilarious „IS FAT BOB DEAD YET?“ is such a wonderful book with a beating heart, in spite of all its obliqueness. A thriller that evokes Elmore Leonard and Donald E. Westlake at their best, but adds several layers of absurdity and a narrative voice that suggests metafiction meets a Greek chorus meets Jane Austen …

In our BINGEWATCH TRANCE DECEMBER corner, two series of 2016 take center stage: as different as they are, these legal dramas offer rather dark tales: GOLIATH (season 1), a fresh take on the old John-Grisham school (it’s not written by Grisham though) with fabulous Billy Bob Thornton, and THE NIGHT OF (one season only!), mirroring the neo-realistic grittiness of the „noir“- underworlds of „The Wire“ or „True Detective“, in this case with fabulous John Turturro.

P.S. January 2017 will be the month of promising new works by Brian Eno (purely ambient this time, and, nevertheless, another landscape, another thinking space for sure), Tinariwen, The Necks (on Mego now), Ralph Towner (guitar solo, recorded in Lugano, release date: February (!) 3rd), and „the fearless freaks“ (watch the documentary!) of The Flaming Lips.